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It’s Minions season. Those endearingly little yellow creatures with a talent for chaos only show up on the big screen in late June or early July, with or without Gru, and for Minions & Monsters, their third stand-alone outing, they’re keeping some new company, both monstrous and glittering.
The plot sends a tribe of Minions to sea like storybook explorers on the hunt for an evil new master. What follows is a string of encounters that end in typical Minion-style disaster: an especially nasty Cyclops delivers a pitch-perfect Lego gag, a French tyrant gets more than he bargained for, and even The Mummy can’t handle the chaos. Eventually the gang washes up in 1920s Hollywood, where they mistake a runaway outlaw for a potential new boss. It’s actually just a Western being filmed on location, but the mix-up catches the eye of producer Max, voiced by Christoph Waltz, and the Minions become overnight sensations in Tinsel Town. Their fame doesn’t survive the arrival of the talkies, but one member of the gang catches the filmmaking bug and sets out to make a monster movie of his own. Finding suitably big and brutal creatures turns out to be the easy part. Keeping them under control is another story entirely.
Minions & Monsters Is a Love Letter to Old Hollywood That Never Runs Out of Bananas
Director Pierre Coffin wears his love for the movies, and for Hollywood’s silent era in particular, right on his sleeve. It’s no accident that the Minions arrive in a frantic, Keystone Cops-style chase sequence packed with loving tributes to the giants of early comedy. Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton get their most iconic moments lovingly recreated, while Charlie Chaplin lingers longest of all, giving the Minions a chance to gum up the famous machinery from Modern Times. Once the talkies arrive, the film pivots into incredible parodies of classics like Citizen Kane and To Have and Have Not. Neither will ever look quite the same again. Even when the jokes sail over younger viewers’ heads, the laughs land anyway. It’s hard to stop giggling across the entire 90-minute runtime, regardless of your age.
For all its wacky antics, gibberish dialogue, and requisite banana obsession, Minions & Monsters is also a film with something to say, and that message is tied directly to its love of movie magic. It’s not as clumsy as it sounds, either. Sure, the film is preaching to the converted since everyone watching is already sitting in a theater seat, choosing to be there. But that’s the point: the audience is having fun, and that fun makes them, kids and adults alike, more receptive to the idea that nothing beats the communal experience of watching a film on the big screen.
Minions & Monsters shouldn’t work as well as it does. It’s silly, it’s sweet, and honestly, it’s a blast.
Minions & Monsters will bring out the kid in everyone who sees it. The silliness and stupidity that have always been the Minions’ calling card feel even sharper than they did when the characters first stormed cinemas sixteen years ago. Technically, that makes them teenagers now, but acne and angst were never going to be part of their story. This is a franchise that knows exactly what it is, and it has never had more fun proving it.
Grade: B
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Minions & Monsters
This is the rambunctious, ridiculous and totally true story of how the Minions conquered Hollywood, became movie stars, lost everything, unleashed monsters onto the world and then banded together to try and save the planet from the mayhem they had just created.
Release Date: July 1, 2026
Director: Pierre Coffin
Cast: Pierre Coffin , Trey Parker , Allison Janney
